Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines

Volume 20, Issue 1, Fall 2000

Counterexamples and Tacit Premises

I argue that there are at least two kinds of tacit premises; describe a certain type of counterexample against the validity of arguments, and then use it to identify one kind of tacit premise. I distinguish two classes of tacit premises on the grounds that they are discovered or constructed differently, they have different roles in an argument or causal explanation, and have different logical relations to each other.